Word: blackly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They are the great romantics of the black tradition: what Ellington played, Bearden painted; what Bearden painted and Ellington played, Ellison put into words. Together their work expressed the belief that the ultimate source of a sublime African-American art was to be found in the vernacular--the myths and folktales, the language games such as the dozens and signifying, and the sorrow songs and blues out of which each fashioned a sophisticated jazz idiom. And most audaciously of all, each believed the fundamental structuring principle of Negro art--improvisation--was also the essence of American democracy. The ultimate Americans...
Phoenix has had its share of both. Last year the city paid $5.3 million to the family of a black 25-year-old who died as the result of a neck hold during a 1994 altercation with police; he was a double amputee whose prosthetic legs came off during the struggle. And a civil trial awaits in the 1996 police killing of a 16-year-old Hispanic, shot 25 times while armed with a butcher knife...
Ellison (who had tried both music and painting as careers) did not introduce modernism to his chosen art form as Ellington did. Rather, he introduced black music to literary modernism, creating in his first novel, Invisible Man, a symphony of magisterial jazz riffs centered on Carl Jung's claims that "the Negro...lives within [the American's] skin, subconsciously," and on the firm belief, shared with Bearden and Ellington, that it is the self--the black self, however buffeted by racism--that is the ultimate repository of one's fate. Destiny and liberation were inextricably tied to the solitary will...
Despite Hickman's attempts to warn his long-departed prodigal son, a black assassin shoots Sunraider on the floor of the Senate. The novel's action takes place on what we assume to be the Senator's deathbed in the form of remembered riffs of sermons, folktales, signifying and the dozens, in an often dazzling extended call-and-response pattern suggestive of two dueling horns in an after-hours gig at a jazz club...
...music world will be on him for another reason this week: on Thursday the multimillionaire hip-hop mogul is scheduled to appear in a New York State criminal courtroom to face felony charges for assault. In April he and two bodyguards invaded the office of Interscope Records president of black music Steve Stoute and allegedly administered a street-style beat-down. Combs blamed Stoute for allowing MTV to air a music video with a scene of Puffy nailed to a cross--a scene Combs had ordered...